To Dwell in the Side of Christ

In his Introduction to the Devout Life, Saint Francis de Sales recounts the following story about the fourteenth-century saint Elzear of Sabran:

When the blessed Elzear, Count of the Provence of Arian, had been long separated from his pious and beloved wife Delphine, she sent a messenger to inquire after him, and he returned answer, “I am well, dear wife, and if you would see me, seek me in the wounded side of our dear Lord Jesus; that is my sure dwelling place, and elsewhere you will seek me in vain.” Surely he was a true Christian knight who spoke thus.

Such devotion to the side of Christ—even though it appears in the writings of some of the greatest saints and doctors of the Church—sounds more than a little jarring to us today. But it has deep roots in both Scripture and Tradition, and constitutes a unique challenge—and invitation—to Christians in our time.

The Double Sign

Devotion to the side of Christ springs from a particular detail reported in John’s account of the passion, which is read at every Good Friday liturgy:

Now since it was preparation day,
in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath,
for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one,
the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken
and that they be taken down.
So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first
and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus.
But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead,
they did not break his legs,
but one soldier thrust his lance into his side,
and immediately blood and water flowed out. (John 19:31–34)

We find, in the Church’s history, devotions to the wounds suffered by Christ during his crucifixion—from the more common “five wounds” (Christ’s two hands, two feet, and side) to the five-thousand-plus wounds meditated upon by mystics like Saints Gertrude and Bridget of Sweden.

But a crucial fact about the side wound—so prominent it’s easy to overlook—is that it was a postmortem wound. Jesus did not, in his human nature, suffer any pain from it; he was “already dead.” He had already declared his sacrifice on the cross “finished” and already given up his spirit to the Father (19:30). Thus, the opening up of Christ’s side, in comparison with all the other wounds of his body, was absolutely singular and unique. In a strict sense, it arguably wasn’t even a part of Christ’s passion at all, the sacrificial suffering (passio) endured by the Word incarnate; instead, it was, as John Paul II put it, a “sign.”

But this leads to an equally obvious, and equally easy to miss, question: If Jesus was “already dead,” why did the soldier pierce him? The conventional answer (and a plausible one) is that this was to confirm that Jesus was, in fact, dead. But why would John write so bluntly and unequivocally that the soldiers “saw that he was already dead”—men who, it’s safe to assume, had seen plenty of dying and dead men in their day, and knew the difference? And if there was any doubt on this score, why wouldn’t the soldiers simply have broken his legs to hasten his death, as they did the two thieves—especially if the order came directly from Pontius Pilate?

An awful possibility presents itself: that the soldier’s lance thrust was simply a capstone act of wanton cruelty. These same Romans, after all, had already viciously mocked their scapegoat with a crown of thorns, a purple cloak, faux-adoration, and body blows (John 19:2–3). Isn’t it likely that they brought the same malicious bloodlust to Golgotha? Maybe the soldier thrust his spear into the sacred flesh with utter indifference; or maybe, fearfully gazing on their murder of Love incarnate, he flew into a paroxysm of rage—a vestige of those primal myths culminating in the dismemberment of a sacrificial victim.

Whatever the motivation, Christ was, in fact, “already dead” when the soldier struck him, and this last, superfluous wounding of Christ uniquely mirrors our own depravity back at us. It seems a definitive sealing of humanity’s fate: Not content with having “killed the Author of life” (Acts 3:15), we then mutilated the precious body he laid down to save us. Could there be any doubt that humanity is beyond all hope? The pierced side of Christ is the ultimate sign, it seems, of the depths of wickedness and wretchedness that led to the crucifixion of “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).

But the lance is a double-edged sword, and the opening of Christ’s side a double sign. If, in that final blow, we see the far edge of human iniquity, we also see the threshold of divine mercy. The final punctuation mark on the worst of all evils is also the pinprick that bursts open the floodgates of Good Friday. “One soldier thrust his lance into his side”—but this action is met, simultaneously, by an infinitely greater reaction: “Immediately blood and water flowed out.”

There’s a rich tradition in Church history, stretching back to the patristic era, of interpreting this blood and water as a sign of the salvation on offer through the Church. Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, and Augustine all saw in this outpouring the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist—a view reaffirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1225). One of the most arresting symbols of Christ in the Middle Ages—that of a mother pelican wounding her own side to feed, with her blood, her young gathered under her wings—hinges on this same understanding. Christ’s side is the locus of sacramental healing and sustenance. Indeed, tradition names the soldier who pierced Christ as Longinus (likely from lonche, Greek for “spear”), and tells of the healing of his eyes from a drop of Christ’s blood and his subsequent conversion to Christianity.

But the early Christians saw in the wounded side of Christ more than individual sacraments; they saw their whole origin and identity—the very source of the “wondrous sacrament of the Church” herself (CCC 766). Ephrem the Syrian writes, “‘There came forth blood and water,’ which is his church, and it is built on him, just as Adam, whose wife was taken from his side.” In his Tractates on John, Augustine likewise sees this revelation of the Church prefigured in the creation of Eve from Adam (Gen. 2:22): “This second Adam bowed His head and fell asleep on the cross, that a spouse might be formed for Him from that which flowed from the sleeper’s side.” The Church is the New Eve, a new creation emerging from the side of her Bridegroom. It’s also, Augustine adds—laying the groundwork for reflection on Christ’s side by the medieval mystics—prefigured by the side of the ark (Gen. 6:16), “whereby the animals might enter which were not destined to perish.”

The New Eve is also the New Israel—and the Church’s identification with Christ’s side is only deepened by the Law and the prophets. John in his Gospel makes one explicit connection with Zechariah 12:10: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced” (John 19:37). But there’s also the water flowing from the side of the temple in Ezekiel 47:1 and the water flowing from the struck rock in Exodus 17:6, an image recalled by Saint Paul: “All drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ” (1 Cor. 4:10).

But a few chapters later in John, we discover that the spiritual movement runs both ways: putting one’s hand into the side of Christ becomes the ultimate sign of faith in the face of doubt. Christ invites the Doubting Apostle to literally feel the truth of the resurrection: “Bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe” (John 20:27). In his Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas, drawing on a Pseudo-Augustine source, likewise makes entering Christ’s side the measure of friendship with him: “[He will] show His wounds to His enemies, so that He who is the Truth may convict them, saying: ‘Behold the man whom you crucified; see the wounds you inflicted; recognize the side you pierced, since it was opened by you and for you, yet you would not enter.’”

The Church—following both the beloved disciple who reclined “at Jesus’ side” (John 13:23) and the doubting disciple who placed his hand within it—began striving not just to understand itself in relation to the side of Christ but to make its very dwelling there.

The Cleft of the Rock

In the Song of Solomon, the lover (i.e., Christ) speaks to his beloved (i.e., the Church), saying,

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff,
let me see your face, let me hear your voice. (Song of Sol. 2:13–14)

In a homily on the Song, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux interpreted the clefts of the rock spiritually as the wounds of Christ, with a particular emphasis on the side of Christ opening up to his heart:

The nails cry aloud, and the wounds cry aloud, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. The sword passed through His soul, and came near to His Heart, that He might so learn to have a fellow feeling with our infirmities. Through the clefts of His Body the secret of His Heart is laid open. . . .

I will enter into those storehouses so richly filled. . . . I will be as it were a dove making her nest in the deepest recess of the cleft, so that, being set with Moses in the cleft of the rock, I may attain to see the Lord at least from behind as He passes by (Exod. 33:23).

About a century later, Saint Bonaventure picked up the same theme in his Tree of Life:

Behold how the spear thrown . . . made a cleft in the rock and a hollow place in the cliff as an abode for doves (Song of Sol. 2:14).

Rise, therefore, beloved of Christ,

be like the dove

that makes its nest in the heights in the mouth of a cleft (Jer. 48:28).

There,

like a sparrow that finds a home (Ps. 83:4),

do not cease to keep watch.

The intuition of the early Christians that the Church, the sacrament of salvation, sprang out of the wounded side of Christ as from a fountain, thus matured in the Middle Ages into a retreat into the side of Christ as into a fortress. Yet these aren’t mutually exclusive conceptions; on the contrary, they are—like contemplation and action, worship and evangelization—mutually implicative and reinforcing. We see the connection reiterated in the modern hymn “Rock of Ages”:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure.

The Church wasn’t just born once from that wound; it’s continually born anew within it, precisely to the degree that it takes shelter there. Like Moses (Ex 33:22) and Elijah (1 Kngs 19:1–14), it meets the glory of God in the refuge of a rock cleft and, on the mountaintop, converses with Jesus about his “exodus” from this world (Luke 9:31). Perhaps Jesus, Moses, and Elijah themselves even spoke on that mountain—as the Church does now—of the wound linking the cleft and the cross.

In his final encyclical letter, Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis traced a direct line running from this medieval devotion to the side of Christ to the Sacred Heart devotion, which was prefigured by Gertrude of Helfta, took shape with Margaret Mary Alocoque, and flowered with Saint Faustina Kowalska. “Gradually, the wounded side of Christ,” Francis writes, “as the abode of his love and the wellspring of the life of grace, began to be associated with his heart, especially in monastic life.” Indeed, Sacred Heart icons often include the lance wound in Christ’s heart—and even the lance itself.

And the saints continued to speak of dwelling in the Lord’s side: Catherine of Siena (“Make your home and hiding place in the cavern of his open side”), Jane Francis de Chantal (“I am certain that we will . . . dwell forever in the Lord’s wounded side”), and again, Francis de Sales (“I hope that you are resting in the cleft of the turtledove and in the pierced side of our beloved Savior”).

The connection between the two devotions is underscored in paragraph 54 of Dilexit Nos: “While the depiction of a heart afire may be an eloquent symbol of the burning love of Jesus Christ, it is important that this heart not be represented apart from him.” A footnote emphasizes that “the Church has forbidden placing on the altar representations of the heart of Jesus or Mary alone.” Devotion to his heart, like devotion to his side, is inseparable from Jesus himself; they are two aspects of one and the same nearness to, and intertwining with, “the depths of God” laid bare in his Son: “Abide in me as I abide in you” (1 Cor. 2:10; John 15:4).

To Dwell in the Side of Christ

Why does this devotion of abiding in the side of Christ so strange to us today? There are several reasons, but three interconnected ones seem most decisive.

First, our culture valorizes individual power and autonomy, the measuring of all things by and for the self. We’re accustomed to absolute sovereignty over what we pick up and put down, what we stand for and stand against, what we scroll through and swipe away. This is true of religion as of everything else; even our professed love for premodern traditions often bears the marks of this quintessentially modern habit: We don’t think with the Church but insist that the Church think with us.

But to dwell in the side of Christ? Here, we find the complete opposite foundation. To live within Christ is to know one’s own subjective smallness and helplessness. It shrinks us down to size: We’re not, as David Foster Wallace put it, the lords of our own little “skull-sized kingdoms.” This devotion not only reminds us that we’re much smaller than God and what he accomplished for us in Jesus; it entreats us to, always as our first move, lower our heads, drop our hands, and enter humbly into his shadow of his wings, praying, with the psalmist, “Rescue me, Lord, from my enemies; I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will for you are my God” (Ps. 143:9–10); “Be a rock of refuge for me, a mighty stronghold to save me, for you are my rock, my stronghold” (Ps. 31:3–4).

Second, our culture, though deeply materialistic in its beliefs, is highly abstracted in its habits. We tend to inhabit the worst of both worlds: the conviction that all that exists is physical, and the inability to connect with physical things meaningfully. As Walker Percy wrote, “The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection.” We value private experience and endless reflection—the two converging, more and more, on the fawning, personalized super-counsel of artificial intelligence.

But to dwell in the side of Christ? This devotion—while remaining deeply spiritual—has, by stark contrast, a physical, visceral, even gory immediacy. Again, even in matters religious, we tend toward abstractions, reducing words like “love” to vacuous platitudes. But this incarnational spirituality of the wounded side is nothing if not tangible: It brings us flesh to flesh with the suffering Christ and, by extension, with his guises in the suffering poor. It insists that our reflections be guided by a passion for God, just as our passions are guided by abstract reflection.

Third and finally, we value clean, well-lighted secular spaces. The autonomous, reflective self—in dread of the nothingness in and around it—thrives wherever religious, metaphysical, and moral demands are nonexistent, or at least unimportant. At least, it thinks it thrives: As questions of God, being, and the meaning of life are brushed aside as “deepities”—we’re incapable of understanding and manipulating them, so why bother—we’re left with a tidal wave of empty distractions.

But to dwell in the side of Christ? This is a place of mysticism and mystery, of the holy places that are also dark places—a disorienting subsumption into the very body of God. We encounter here a “deep and dazzling darkness”—a reality we can’t control or manipulate (we’re overwhelmed by the divine depths) but also can never run from or flee (we’re dazzled by the divine light). That word that’s so often hollowed out—love—here finds its divine referent. The side of Christ is the centermost point of both God and man, both Christ and the Church, both heaven and earth—and the point where all of them flow together for the renewal of all things (Rev. 21:5).

The Church has plunged deeper and deeper into that fountain of mercy down the centuries, and most of its greatest saints, doctors, and mystics are found somewhere along that trajectory. And while some of the exaggerated language may have fallen out of theological fashion, its high-water mark—the medieval mystic-saints dwelling on dwelling in the side of Christ—is a kind of fulcrum across two thousand years of Christian devotion.

What would it mean to return to it? It wouldn’t mean turning one’s back on the Sacred Heart devotion; the two are, as we saw, interconnected. It wouldn’t mean a retreat to the medieval era; the devotion, again, runs from the Apostle John and Augustine up through Pope Francis (and now Pope Leo) and the Catechism. It wouldn’t even mean a challenge to the modern world, for the Sacred Heart devotion began, and flourished, in precisely the past four centuries.

But it would mean a challenge to the deepest dysfunctions of our day. Those three qualities we prize so highly—autonomy, abstraction, secularity—have brought us to societal crisis. No one knows what lies beyond that crisis, but this much is clear: The world won’t survive doubling down on our mistakes. The glorification of autonomy strips us not only of humility but of all sense of proportion; the march of abstracted intelligence threatens to undermine the whole of Western civilization; and our ongoing drift into mere secularity shakes the foundations of every cultural and moral inheritance we take for granted.

More importantly, it would mean the discovery—in these topsy-turvy times that make our hearts so afraid—of the ultimate place of safety and security, of a peace the world can’t give (John 14:27), of communion with the Lord of heaven and earth. And it would mean that our restless hearts not only find their rest in God, but also begin to flow, like the Savior’s, with “rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away . . .”